Engine failure or pilot error? Questions are mounting as the Air India disaster investigation begins

In the seconds before flight AI171 crashed on Thursday, killing 241 passengers and crew, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and his co-pilot would have been bombarded with alerts.

A ground proximity system alert on the Air India jet would have repeatedly warned: “Don’t sink. Don’t sink. Don’t sink.” Systems warnings would have lit up the cockpit instrument panel.

“Mayday, mayday,” was the final message sent by Sabharwal as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner stopped climbing and hurtled towards the ground. It was the world’s worst aviation disaster for a decade and a devastating setback for crisis-hit Boeing as it fights to restore its reputation.

The decisions on the flight deck – and the reactions of the captain and co-pilot, Clive Kunder – during just 30 seconds of what should have been a flight of more than nine hours on the plane from Ahmedabad, in India’s western state of Gujarat, to London Gatwick, will now be a key focus of the investigation launched into the crash. A black box was recovered from the crash site on Friday, India’s civil aviation minister confirmed.

In a briefing on Saturday, Samir Kumar Sinha, a secretary for India’s aviation ministry, said the flight had reached about 650ft after takeoff before it crashed into buildings at Meghani Nagar, less than two miles from the airport. Air accident investigators from the UK have arrived in India and are supporting the investigation team.

Aviation experts said the video footage of the flight from takeoff to crash suggest there may have been a lack of power required for a successful takeoff. The landing gear was not retracted, and one possible explanation is that the required engine power was not available to operate the hydraulics.

“It is extraordinarily rare, but there is very limited time if there is a dual engine failure at 600ft,” said Martin Alder, former airline pilot and flight safety specialist at the British Airline Pilots’ Association. “Whatever the cause, they only had a few seconds and they were in a densely built-up area. There were no good options.”

There could be various causes for failure in power to both engines, including bird strikes or fuel contamination. Investigators will need to establish whether the ram air turbine was deployed, a back-up system that operates when the main engines fail to provide enough power for key systems.

Alder said it was possible that pilot error was to blame, for example with a wrong lever pulled, and the wing flaps extended in error rather than the landing gear retracted. He said it was a less likely scenario because there would have been immediate warnings of error and a modern aircraft with the latest technology would still typically be able to take off.

The jet crashed into a hostel for medical students of Byramjee Jeejeebhoy medical college and civil hospital. It ripped apart a dining hall where doctors and students were eating their lunch. All but one of the 242 passengers and crew were killed. About 30 people were killed on the ground, including three student doctors.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, the sole survivor, told reporters last week the lights “started flickering” moments after takeoff and it felt as if the plane was “stuck in the air”. Ramesh was in seat 11A near an emergency exit and managed to clamber out of the jet.

The crash is a serious setback for Boeing which, in April, announced that its Dreamliner fleet had carried a total of 1 billion passengers in 14 years of service, reaching the landmark number faster than any widebody commercial airline in history. Until this week, it had an exemplary safety record.

The Air India tragedy is the first time at Boeing 787 Dreamliner has been involved in a fatal crash, but the manufacturer has been involved in a string of scandals, with whistleblowers criticising its safety culture. The company has been under mounting scrutiny over its safety record since two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes crashed in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, killing nearly 350 people in total.

Boeing has been forced to defend its record in recent years after a whistleblower claimed in 2019 that faulty parts were being fitted to planes on the production line at Boeing’s plant where the Dreamliner is manufactured. John Barnett, a former ­quality manager, who killed himself last year, alleged under-pressure workers ­fitted substandard parts from scrap bins to aircraft on the production line. Other defective parts were lost in the production line, he claimed. The Federal Aviation Administration upheld some of Barnett’s concerns and Boeing said they had been “fully resolved”.

Another whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, a quality engineer at Boeing, last year claimed managers ignored problems with its 787 and 777 jets and that there was a “broader pattern of Boeing ignoring and suppressing safety and quality issues.” Boeing said the claims were inaccurate.

In 2020, Boeing was sued by the low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle over the production and delivery of the Boeing 737 Max and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It alleged that “shoddy manufacturing” was involved on the production line, with objects routinely left inside the finished aircraft, including “tools, metal shavings, and even an entire ladder”. The dispute was later resolved.

Some aviation experts say the length of service of the Dreamliner and the model’s excellent safety record suggest it is unlikely that the crash will have involved a manufacturing defect. Jeff Guzzetti, a retired air safety investigator with the US National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration, told reporters last week that he did not consider this was “a manufacturing or production issue.”

Boeing chief executive Kelly Ortberg joined the company in August, tasked with turning it around. He was this week due to attend the Paris air show, but has cancelled the plans so the company can “focus on our customer and the investigation”. Boeing’s fortunes, the mission to restore its reputation and rejection of many of the concerns raised by whistleblowers is now closely entwined with exactly what happened on the 30-second flight of AI171.

GE Aerospace, whose engines were in the Boeing 787 plane, said: “Our senior leadership is focused on supporting our customers and the investigation.”